NanoWriMo 2009 - Fic 26

[deathpixie]

"...and it came to pass on her sixteenth birthday, the king and queen gave their daughter up to the witch, or else the kingdom would suffer..."

She'd known all her life this moment would come. From the time she was old enough to understand the world around her, she'd known she was under a sentence, that come her sixteenth birthday her life as she knew it would end. The bargain her parents had made had to be upheld, or else the kingdom itself would fall.

And she'd prepared.

While other princesses were learning courtly manners and dance, she learned tactics and swordplay. Instead of tutors and nannies, she had assassins and warriors teaching her their craft. She learned cunning and guile from her father's politicians and spies and horsemanship from the finest riders in the land. She trained for hours every day, honing her mind and her body, swimming, climbing, running. Her ladies tried to tell her to wait for the handsome prince that would surely come to save her, but she'd laughed and shook her head and challenged them to swim a lap of the castle moat against her.

When the fateful day came, she had played her part well; weeping and quailing, she had let the witch take her to the highest tower of her castle and lock her inside. She had bemoaned her fate and wondered aloud as to who might possibly rescue her. And when the witch had gone, satisfied that her captive was helpless, the princess had pulled a set of lockpicks out of her elaborately coiffed hair and set to work on the door.

The witch never knew what hit her.

As she rode home, the witch's head in a bag slung from her saddle horn the riches of fifty years of princess-stealing slung around her neck and stuffed in her saddlebags, the princess knew then that one's destiny wasn't always what was told in storybooks. And for the first time in her life, she would be free to live however she wanted.

Even if it gave her mother conniptions.

Comments

[sparrowsverse.livejournal.com]

*giggles* Girl power! Love this and how the princess took action for herself. :)

I'd ask, now what for the princess, but it's a fairy tale, we know she lives happily ever after. ;) Unless you know, rock falls and kills the princess. ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Great story! Think it would be worse if a prince found her, they'd marry, and then it turns out he's gay. Better to realize sooner that they are "free to live however [they want]."
KK